Do we have enough goals in the squad?

I think how Zirkzee fits in the team will be key and it should show right from preseason or we're in for a long season again.

Last season, our main front three (Rashford - Hojlund - Garnacho) had too similar profiles, with all of them wanting to get the final ball in behind the defense. Overall, their playstyles didn't combine well; or at all in fact.

If Zirkzee can be the link between whoever plays on flanks, then our attack will be unlocked. Unlike Antony, Amad also seems to be capable of playing other players in as well as cut inside, so our attack will be even more diversified. Never mind the goals, I think we will be far more entertaining.

Andersons Dietician said:
Personally I think if we remove Rashford from the equation we as a collective will score a lot more goals.
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I don't understand why Rashford gets singled out for this when his deputy, Garnacho, is guilty of this just as much. Heck, even Antony and Rasmus himself aren't that good at playing others in.
 
Having Martinez and Shaw play a lot more games will itself help this.
We basically played all of last season without any help to our left wing from defence.

It wasn't like our right side massively compensated for it either.
 
It would really help if we knew what contribution we can expect from Mount this season.

We've made a big investment in him, but it's still difficult to see how he gets minutes in the team to help our attacking play when Bruno is a guarentee in the team.
 
The top 7 last year all got more goals than we have in any of the seasons since Ferguson left, the lack of goals in the team has been a problem for a while. Right now it's difficult to see how we're going to go from the chaos of last year to being able to score goals regularly by dominating the majority of games.

Unless we just embrace the chaos again or we get an unexpectedly massive leap in production from a couple of individuals then we won't get anywhere near 2 goals a game which is where you need to be close to being a top side.
 
On paper right now, I’d say no but I remember back in 2006 when Ruud was sold and similar conversations were had whether we had enough goals with the young and inconsistent Ronaldo and Rooney being front and centre, Saha had just returned from a bad injury and scored a few and Solskjaer had an even worse injury spell and returned.

Not saying something like that will happen again, but players step up and play styles change.
 
No.
At the moment we’re just hoping Amad will have a big impact as well as Garnacho and Hojlund improving.

I can’t believe we’re potentially going into a new season with Sancho still here.
Antony too.

We were interested in Olise, but why haven’t there been any major links to other good wingers?

Let’s see what happens but ideally we move sancho on and get an effective winger, e.g. Neto or Nico Williams
 
Leftback99 said:
Absolutely not, same as last season. We should be buying an experienced number 9.
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See this is the kind of logic where 2+2 = 5. A striker alone (even the best in the world) won’t make a tiny bit of difference when the team unit isn’t fully functioning as intended. Would Kane have outscored Rasmus in our side last season? (yeh probably but not by loads). Kane would have looked exactly as he did for England at the euros, out of sorts, on the periphery of games and people would have been questioning if he was finished as a player. It’s far too simplistic, better individuals means nothing if you don’t play and move as a team.

When palace battered us last season people were shocked. I wasn’t, it was entirely predictable because they were playing as a complete team against a Utd team who may as well have been 11 strangers on the pitch. The answer to our goal scoring is systematic above anything else.
 
Can't trust Rashford unfortunately, hopefully our style of play is a lot more energetic and consists of us peppering the oppositions goal this time round.

I'd still like to bring Toney over as the experience is seriously lacking up top.
 
This was my main concern when we were linked to Zirkzee.

Nothing against Zirkzee because he's a very interesting profile and looks a shrewd pick up but it doesn't add much to the squad in terms of proven, consistent goalscoring threat.

We've got a lot of bits and pieces scorers. They all score on their day or in Rashfords case depending on whether he's on a hot season or not. But there's nothing you'd hang your hat on amongst this squad for goals, we are rather hoping and praying we will play better and spread the goals around I think.

I think even worse than the strikers for goals is wide. If Rashford doesn't do shit again I'm not sure what to expect. Antony never scores. Amad can but to think he'll get 15 goals, optimistic in the extreme. Garnacho will do well to get those numbers.
 
The Irish Connection said:
No.
At the moment we’re just hoping Amad will have a big impact as well as Garnacho and Hojlund improving.

I can’t believe we’re potentially going into a new season with Sancho still here.
Antony too.

We were interested in Olise, but why haven’t there been any major links to other good wingers?

Let’s see what happens but ideally we move sancho on and get an effective winger, e.g. Neto or Nico Williams
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We’ve got 6 wingers, and I think realistically only Pellistri will be easy to shift.

Pellistri - won’t be here
Garnacho - obvious keep
Amad - keep
Sancho - we’d sell if we got someone who’d take him and his wages on
Antony - see above
Rashford - see above

If we could move players on better I think we’d of went on for a winger
 
I’d say there will be more goals but spread out among more players. Zirkzee is a provider more than scorer, Mount will chip in, Rashford hopefully bounces back, but we are still missing an actual finisher.

Bruno will get a few more than last term, Garnacho, Højlund, Rashford, Amad all nab around 10 each, Mount with 7 or 8, Zirkzee 6, Casemiro 5, McTominay 5, The odd freak goal from a defender on a corner.
 
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Bwuk said:
We’ve got 6 wingers, and I think realistically only Pellistri will be easy to shift.

Pellistri - won’t be here
Garnacho - obvious keep
Amad - keep
Sancho - we’d sell if we got someone who’d take him and his wages on
Antony - see above
Rashford - see above

If we could move players on better I think we’d of went on for a winger
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Yes, true. I suppose the question is why we don’t take a bit less for Antony and/or Sancho and get one winger in.
Could surely get €30m for Sancho and €15-20m for Antony? That would cover the majority of a fee for a new winger.

Anyway, there’s still time of course but I’d be disappointed if we don’t see links to a good winger in the next few weeks and signs of departures.
 
The Irish Connection said:
No.
At the moment we’re just hoping Amad will have a big impact as well as Garnacho and Hojlund improving.

I can’t believe we’re potentially going into a new season with Sancho still here.
Antony too.

We were interested in Olise, but why haven’t there been any major links to other good wingers?

Let’s see what happens but ideally we move sancho on and get an effective winger, e.g. Neto or Nico Williams
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Both Sancho and Antony offer the same type of end product, which appears to be passes to feet in the box. I don’t see either one of them standing up crosses or whipping in from the bye-line, which to me looks like they are creating more for themselves than for a striker like Højlund. Amad had a nice cutback vs Rangers, but he as well doesn’t look like the flying wingers of old.

I doubt we sell Antony so quickly (and who would bid for him?) but Sancho’s style just doesn’t seem to fit attacking at speed, so I hope we sell him.
 
The Irish Connection said:
Yes, true. I suppose the question is why we don’t take a bit less for Antony and/or Sancho and get one winger in.
Could surely get €30m for Sancho and €15-20m for Antony? That would cover the majority of a fee for a new winger.

Anyway, there’s still time of course but I’d be disappointed if we don’t see links to a good winger in the next few weeks and signs of departures.
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What winger for a combined €50m are you seeing as a literal game-changer? Transfer Markt has Nico Williams at €70m, for example, and that’s before the United tax is added. We would also be taking a €60m or so hit against FFP by selling Antony at that price even when factoring in amortization.
 
We have plenty of goalscorers, we just don't have any great goalscorers. Our starting striker is a young kid, Rashford is out of sorts and has always been streaky, Garnacho is another promising kid and clearly hungry for goals, Bruno scores a decent amount but is primarily the main creator. Zirkhee I'm interested to see how he will be utilised, whether as a pure backup/rotation for Hojlund, or if he'll play from the wing or #10 on occasion. I suspect the former, which might help take some of the burden off Hojlund but won't revolutionise our attack.

In an ideal world we'd have a world class forward who would get close to 30 league goals, 40 in all competitions. In that case you'd say we would have enough goals, but that player is not an option. We have to spread the goals around, which means the players mentioned, plus others, need to contribute. Both by scoring themselves and creating chances for others.

Worryingly, I have various different doubts about the rest of our attacking options:

Antony - Horrendous performances last season and poor end product, unclear if he will be at the club for long.
Diallo - Another promising youngster, but unclear how much game time he will get.
Sancho - went AWOL, unclear where hid future lies.
McTominay - reliable goalscorer last season but playing him sacrifices our ability to outplay teams as he lacks technique. Future may also be away from OT sooner or later.
Mount/Eriksen - both have decent goalscoring records in the past but for different reasons are now predominantly playing deeper and don't look like a goalscoring threat from that deeper position.

It's all just a bit of a mess still.
 
The Irish Connection said:
Yes, true. I suppose the question is why we don’t take a bit less for Antony and/or Sancho and get one winger in.
Could surely get €30m for Sancho and €15-20m for Antony? That would cover the majority of a fee for a new winger.

Anyway, there’s still time of course but I’d be disappointed if we don’t see links to a good winger in the next few weeks and signs of departures.
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It's not as simple as sales = more money for us to spend. We need to try sell players at their asset value or as close to it as possible, or we're actually reducing our spending power in FFP terms.

Sancho's book value is around £30m so there's a decent chance we could get that. It's still a matter of convincing him to be sold and go to another club on less wages. He can basically refuse to be sold and stay, or refuse to be sold and ask us to loan him out instead, so we'll have no choice but to loan him out again so he still gets his obscene wages.

Antony's book value is currently around £48 million so we're going to take a huge loss on him. Selling him for £15m does absolutely nothing for us, it just reduces the amount we can spend this summer.

Unfortunately we're going to continue to pay the price for years of mis-management.
 
Wing Attack Plan R said:
What winger for a combined €50m are you seeing as a literal game-changer? Transfer Markt has Nico Williams at €70m, for example, and that’s before the United tax is added. We would also be taking a €60m or so hit against FFP by selling Antony at that price even when factoring in amortization.
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Apparently Nico Williams has a release clause of around £50m. I would say the same would be tempting to Wolves for Neto. Doué is rumored to be valued at around £30m and Bakayoko around the same.

Yes, Antony is probably a dead loss.
 
The Irish Connection said:
Apparently Nico Williams has a release clause of around £50m. I would say the same would be tempting to Wolves for Neto. Doué is rumored to be valued at around £30m and Bakayoko around the same.

Yes, Antony is probably a dead loss.
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Williams would be an incredible upgrade. I think Antony is one-trick pony, Sancho too, but Williams would be a handful for any defense. We really got rinsed on the Antony fee, wow.
 
I think we're set to massively struggle again. I think our creativity looks to be just as much of a problem as last year. Hopefully tactically we see an improvement, we must do.

If Rashford has a return to form that would be a massive boost, but even then you're really hoping some of the other bad performers from last year really improve.
 
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We don't have the personnel to put 8 past forest like city does. But it's not that it matters.

As long as we score 2 per game with a solid defence and decent midfield control should be enough to end the season with 75+ points.
 
It's really important to score goals, but we also have to concede as little as possible, we suffered from both in the last 5 seasons except for 2020/2021 where we scored more than 70+ goals, even in that year we conceded more than 40 goals in the PL, looking at City numbers for example, they do not concede more than 35 goals, and in some seasons they concede less than 30, we should aim to concede below 35 goals a season, this will ensure we do not lose games even if we do not score enough, defensive stability is the bedrock of winning titles.
 
The Irish Connection said:
No.
At the moment we’re just hoping Amad will have a big impact as well as Garnacho and Hojlund improving.

I can’t believe we’re potentially going into a new season with Sancho still here.
Antony too.

We were interested in Olise, but why haven’t there been any major links to other good wingers?

Let’s see what happens but ideally we move sancho on and get an effective winger, e.g. Neto or Nico Williams
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On the wingers part - how do you solve that? As things stand we have 3 right wingers (Garnacho, Amad, Antony) and two left wingers (Rashford, Sancho). Add Mount to that mix as he can cover both wings in an emergency.

So what do we do? If we sign a RW, might as well sell Amad PLUS it still doesn't look likely we'll offload Antony.

Left wing situation is even worse as we have two players with comnbined wages of what, 600k a week? We are not going to sign a LW who is better than Rashford, because in that scenario our best paid player is not going to be a starter!

I think It's really difficult situation. There is no obvious move to make as long as Rashford is here. Sancho is another big problem that we're actively trying to solve, but even if he leaves we need to think if we want to spend money on second choice left winger, or use Garnacho and Mount there.

6 out of 9 attacking players have been added in the last 2 years, most of them in the last year. We don't even know how to use them yet.
 
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Ideally we would move Sancho on and get an experienced attacker in. We have a overload of young players for the front positions. We need someone to guide them a little and keep them on their toes. I also think we are a little light in leaders up the pitch.

Someone like Bernardo Silva would be ideal. Not a physical player, but very clever and can dictate play.
 
Borys said:
On the wingers part - how do you solve that? As things stand we have 3 right wingers (Garnacho, Amad, Antony) and two left wingers (Rashford, Sancho). Add Mount to that mix as he can cover both wings in an emergency.

So what do we do? If we sign a RW, might as well sell Amad PLUS it still doesn't look likely we'll offload Antony.

Left wing situation is even worse as we have two players with comnbined wages of what, 600k a week? We are not going to sign a LW who is better than Rashford, because in that scenario our best paid player is not going to be a starter!

I think It's really difficult situation. There is no obvious move to make as long as Rashford is here. Sancho is another big problem that we're actively trying to solve, but even if he leaves we need to think if we want to spend money on second choice left winger, or use Garnacho and Mount there.

6 out of 9 attacking players have been added in the last 2 years, most of them in the last year. We don't even know how to use them yet.
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Add into the mix that we have good options coming through the academy and it's really hard to think about signing another winger without at least two of the above no longer being here.
 
Hard to tell without a month or so of the season under our belt. I think we’ll see an all around improvement on last year but not sure if we’ve got the quality to fully match the best of the best.

Garnacho another year older, you’d expect as he ages to naturally increase his output as his game IQ increases and decision making takes a step up.

Early signs that Amad is really kicking on from how he ended last year, all signs point to this being a breakout season for him. He’s twenty two now and seems to be over injury issues and has also filled out his frame a decent bit. He’s got a clear opportunity to take that RW spot and run with it.

Rashford and Sancho, all I can really say is there’s really no way to go but up from last year. I’m fairly confident our two previously mentioned younger wingers will be the standout performers but Rashford and Sancho will get minutes and will almost certainly produce more than they did last year.

Hojlund, some ups and downs in that first year, him being our only recognized striker in a fully dysfunctional side made things difficult but he showed tons of promise and really seemed to have gained confidence and elevated his game in the back half of the season.

Zirkzee seems like he could be a key to getting multiple other players plenty of more opportunities than they’ve had in the past due to his link up and creative side, The likes of Rashford and Garnacho will love having a number 9 who can find them and execute the right pass as they run in behind.

Bruno, the midfield, and the rest. I think with Ugarte seemingly coming in and a continuation of the tactical adjustment to actually maintain a structured midfield I think we’ll be a better side as a whole of moving the ball around and creating space and chances. The signing or Yoro as well as having Martinez and Shaw available again should help the flow of our play substantially.

At the end of the day we’re going to have more options available to us off the bench to change games and help unlock defenses, which is huge. Less injuries and more minute management for players who were clearly burnt out will help too. We scored 57 in the league last year, could see us in the 75-80 range this season.
 
Paul778 said:
Add into the mix that we have good options coming through the academy and it's really hard to think about signing another winger without at least two of the above no longer being here.
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I don't know about the youngsters, but I was really surprised that apparently we were after Olise. As good as he is, it's just not a top priority addition to the squad that has serious issues.
 
Doesn't look like it.

Partly, it's because our main attacking options aren't either experienced enough or - in lack of a better word - sophisticated enough to read the opposition defence and create chances for themselves.

Another factor is that the two players who make up our most successful combo in the attacking half are quite temperamental and demand more than a few accommodations (in terms of tactics and personnel) to get the freedom of movement (one) and space (the other) they crave.

Finally, when you want to use transitions, you better train to press well as a unit. With intelligence and purpose. It doesn't have to be the Bielsa type of chasing the ball like rabid dogs (which evidently isn't are strongest suit). On the other hand, you can't tolerate players who stroll around, who sprint aimlessly just for the cameras or who commit tackles with zero chances of success because they can't be bothered to track their man all the way back.

What does this have to do with goals? When you're not a "passing" team, almost everything. It's the key for this lot to look better than the sum of their parts.
 
It's a no from me, dawg. Very simplified our two main problems are:

A) no control in midfield
B) lack of goals

I actually think A is more important to fix, because with control in midfield we will concede fewer chances and create more. Our defenders are not as bad as our defensive stats make it seem. It's just that they are working overtime in a hectic kitchen where multiple pans have caught fire.

The problem is that Ten Hag has not shown that he can solve B yet. In his first season in charge he actually managed to control the games reasonably well. In other words, he has proved that he can fix A to a certain degree. What he hasn't proved is that he can create a high-scoring PL team as well. And that is worrying.

We have 4 attackers aged 20-23, which is very exciting. But there are no reliable "seniors" who can step up and guarantee goals. Rashford and Antony are just not those guys. As things stand now our only hope is that Rashford has a prolonged good period where he scores a brace and hope that those goals will be enough to drag us over whichever arbitrary line we decide is "good enough".
 
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Would still like us to get in a reliable goal source from the wing - we only really have Garnacho as that, and Rashford when he decides to be in form.
 
We don't have reliable goal scorers. So the best strategy at this moment is fortify the defense so that they will keep us in game, and then hope someone will score for us. Hence a competent DM is absolutely crucial.

With that top 3 should be achievable.
 
Possibly, if we play well as team and one of Zirkzee or Rashford has a very good season.

I think Garnacho, Hojlund and Bruno are dangerous players but we really need those 3 at it + another regular scorer.

Unfortunately, If i had to bet my life I would bet that after 10 games we will once again be talking about why we have zero movement, gaping holes in midfield, don't keep the ball and aren't a threat from set pieces.
 
Still lacking a top class striker - not had one for years now

Hojlund might be one in the future but not yet

Zirkzee might bring more out of our wingers
 
What needs to be coached is when to pass or cross the ball,when a player is in a better position, rather than shoot all the while All the wide players and Bruno are guilty of this. If we can find another 20 goals we are guaranteed top 4, and this is a big step compared to last season.
 
Do we have enough assists in the team?

In all competitions, we scored 88 goals last term (excluding OGs), but only 56 saw a player credited with an assist.

That means that 36.4% of our goals were unassisted, and I seem to remember a large proportion of Hojlund's goals contributing to that 'unassisted' stat.

36.4% sounds proportionally pretty high. By comparison, of City's 137 goals, 104 were assisted, means that only 24.1% of their goals went unassisted.

Aston Villa had 72 assists across their squad and 96 goals, meaning 25% were unassisted.

Even Chelsea, who had an abnormally large number of goals from the penalty spot (and were therefore unassisted) have a lower proportion of unassisted goals than us, coming out at 32.7%.

This seems to support the idea that we aren't doing anywhere near enough to create chances, and that adding goals to the side is unlikely to be done by just piling on more goalscorers. The ones we have apparently have to work harder than players in other teams do if they want to get on the score sheet.
 
Even if Rashford has a 20+ season I don't think we do, without him recapturing that form we certainly don't. And either way he's also part of the issue in having wingers who create nowhere near enough chances.

Someone like Olise would have been a massive help, hopefully we can still find the funds to sign someone similar to him.
 
In terms of the players we have showing they have what it takes to put the ball in the net given the chance, we have loads.

People say we are wasteful but I don't think we're any less so than many other teams. The biggest problem is not creating very many good chances most of the time.

The team needs to play much better, more cohesive football. A key part of that for me is for the wide forwards to stop running into walls of multiple defenders and making a mess of crosses and cut backs so often. It's easier said than done, but I do feel we'd score more goals by improving the overall performance with the players we have than spending a hefty sum on an experienced striker and playing how we did last season.
 
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